The Pal-Mac Way is EVERY DAY!
The Pal-Mac Way serves as our district-wide initiative to communicate character traits to our school learning community. The four character traits that make up the Pal-Mac Way are:
Respect, Responsibility, Caring, and Citizenship.
"Schools of character" have implemented programs and routines that help to:
Respect, Responsibility, Caring, and Citizenship.
"Schools of character" have implemented programs and routines that help to:
- Set the tone for respectful learning and a climate of trust for the entire school day.
- Motivate our young people by helping them feel a sense of significance, belonging and fun.
- Enable many extraordinary moments through the repetition of many ordinary moments of respectful interaction.
- Merge social, emotional and intellectual learning.
- Promote emphasis on character to impact student achievement everyday.
The Responsive Classroom
To implement the Pal-Mac Way, we use the Responsive Classroom approach. The Responsive Classroom is an approach to elementary teaching that emphasizes social, emotional, and academic growth in a strong and safe school community. The goal is to enable optimal student learning. Created by classroom teachers and backed by evidence from independent research, the Responsive Classroom approach is based on the premise that children learn best when they have both academic and social-emotional skills. The approach therefore consists of classroom and schoolwide practices for deliberately helping children build academic and social-emotional competencies.
Guiding Principles
Seven principles, informed by the work of educational theorists and the experiences of practicing classroom teachers, guide theResponsive Classroom approach:
Classroom Practices
At the heart of the Responsive Classroom approach are ten classroom practices:
Morning Meeting - gathering as a whole class each morning to greet one another, share news, and warm up for the day ahead
Rule Creation - helping students create classroom rules to ensure an environment that allows all class members to meet their learning goals
Interactive Modeling - teaching children to notice and internalize expected behaviors through a unique modeling technique
Positive Teacher Language - using words and tone as a tool to promote children's active learning, sense of community, and self-discipline
Logical Consequences - responding to misbehavior in a way that allows children to fix and learn from their mistakes while preserving their dignity
Guided Discovery - introducing classroom materials using a format that encourages independence, creativity, and responsibility
Academic Choice - increasing student learning by allowing students teacher-structured choices in their work
Classroom Organization - setting up the physical room in ways that encourage students' independence, cooperation, and productivity
Working with Families - creating avenues for hearing parents' insights and helping them understand the school's teaching approaches
Collaborative Problem Solving - using conferencing, role playing, and other strategies to resolve problems with students
Taken from the Responsive Classroom website.
Guiding Principles
Seven principles, informed by the work of educational theorists and the experiences of practicing classroom teachers, guide theResponsive Classroom approach:
- The social curriculum is as important as the academic curriculum.
- How children learn is as important as what they learn: Process and content go hand in hand.
- The greatest cognitive growth occurs through social interaction.
- To be successful academically and socially, children need a set of social skills: cooperation, assertion, responsibility, empathy, and self-control.
- Knowing the children we teach-individually, culturally, and developmentally-is as important as knowing the content we teach.
- Knowing the families of the children we teach and working with them as partners is essential to children's education.
- How the adults at school work together is as important as their individual competence: Lasting change begins with the adult community.
Classroom Practices
At the heart of the Responsive Classroom approach are ten classroom practices:
Morning Meeting - gathering as a whole class each morning to greet one another, share news, and warm up for the day ahead
Rule Creation - helping students create classroom rules to ensure an environment that allows all class members to meet their learning goals
Interactive Modeling - teaching children to notice and internalize expected behaviors through a unique modeling technique
Positive Teacher Language - using words and tone as a tool to promote children's active learning, sense of community, and self-discipline
Logical Consequences - responding to misbehavior in a way that allows children to fix and learn from their mistakes while preserving their dignity
Guided Discovery - introducing classroom materials using a format that encourages independence, creativity, and responsibility
Academic Choice - increasing student learning by allowing students teacher-structured choices in their work
Classroom Organization - setting up the physical room in ways that encourage students' independence, cooperation, and productivity
Working with Families - creating avenues for hearing parents' insights and helping them understand the school's teaching approaches
Collaborative Problem Solving - using conferencing, role playing, and other strategies to resolve problems with students
Taken from the Responsive Classroom website.
